I hope that everyone had a very merry Christmas with good gifts and not a lump of coal in sight.  Happy Kwanzaa, which begins today, as well.  One of my Christmas presents was that the blog passed 10,000 pageviews on Christmas day.  I still have a ways to go to catch up with Psy, but I'm working on it.

A few entries ago, I compared Alice Munro to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Flannery O'Connor, two authors who share a number of characteristics.  My point in that entry was that the three authors were better read in small doses because the motifs and mannerisms in their work remain constant and thus become too apparent.  Hawthorne and O'Connor both found their form--almost allegorical morality stories--early on, but both suffered from a thinness of material.  (Melville, the other great mid-19th century American novelist had the opposite problem: he never lacked for material, but his novels are often shapeless and unwieldy--sometimes achieving greatness, sometimes remaining a mess.)  For both Hawthorne and O'Connor, the story is always an introduction to the reality of evil and a suggestion of the consequences of that loss of innocence.  Both use rather obvious symbols (especially color) and apt names.  Where they most differ is in their response to evil.  For Hawthorne, we have to accept the double-edged nature of humans.  Young Goodman Brown (Hawthorne had already used gray as a melange of black and white) cannot accept the imperfections of his wife, Faith, (and of human exemplars of faith) with her pink (neither purely scarlet nor purely white) ribbons.  And in his cynicism Brown becomes himself "the chief horror" of the scene.  The devoutly Catholic O'Connor is more pitiless, and her choice is stark and dark.  As the Misfit says (the evil characters often get the good lines) in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find,"  If [Jesus] did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.  No pleasure but meanness."  There is finally no gray or brown or pink in O'Connor's work.

Perhaps O'Connor's best known story, "Good Country People," is a variation of the old farmer's daughter/travelling saleman joke.  The farmer is Mrs. Hopewell, a relentless optimist who speaks almost entirely in clichés.  One of the ironies is that Mrs. Hopewell doesn't even grasp the import of her hackneyed speeches, most of which are of the order of "Everybody's different" and "It takes all kinds to make the world go round."  While she spouts these, she lumps everyone into a few categories, one of which, and the most dangerous, is "good country people" or "the salt of the earth."  The daughter is Hulga (née Joy), who has a Ph.D. in philosophy (much to her mother's consternation), has a wooden leg and a heart disease, and is a confirmed nihilist.  O'Connor loves tricking her audience with a double perspective: for much of the story, we identify with Hulga, simply because she seems so much more intelligent than her mother, and her comments are cynically funny.  But it is a trick, as the travelling salesman/mysterious stranger soon reveals.  Obstensibly selling Bibles, the pseudononymously named Manley Pointer disrupts the farm's equilibrium.  The mother takes him for good country people; Hulga sneers at his naiveté.  But she also hatches a plan to seduce him and convert him to nihilism. 

She's not a very experienced seductress, but they eventually find themselves alone in the hayloft. Pointer bringing his valise with him.  He's fascinated by Hulga's wooden leg, asks her to remove it and then wants to remove it and put it back on himself.  Finally, he keeps it away from her, and opening his valise reveals a hollow Bible with a flask inside, pornographic playing cards, and condoms.  The nihilist Hulga has nothing to fall back on but calling him a hypocrite and not good country people at all.  But Pointer isn't a hypocrite.  And he's certainly not good.  As he tells her, he's been believing in nothing since he was born.  He takes his suitcase--and her leg--and disappears, the seduction and the "conversion" silly fantasies.  If as Hulga believes, love and God are illusions, so too must be evil.  By the end of the story, Hulga and her nihilism are left both literally and figuratively without a leg to stand on.

There's one more important character in the story, again with an appropriate name, Mrs. Freeman.  O'Connor's Catholicism is slathered with a heavy layer of original sin, and being a free man is, for O'Connor, nothing to aspire to.  Mrs. Freeman is a nosy busybody (like Hulga, though more subtly, she condescends to Mrs. Hopewell) who is focused on imperfection.  She had "a special fondness for the details of secret infections, hidden deformities, assaults upon children.  Of diseases, she preferred the lingering or incurable."  She has two daughters, Glynese and Carramae (Hulga calls them Glycerin and Caramel), the latter of whom is pregnant, and Mrs. Freeman loves recounting how many times Carramae has vomited since the last account.  Despite seemingly having no important role in the action, Mrs. Freeman is the subject of both the first and last paragraph of the story.  At the end, her gaze touches the disappearing image of Manley Pointer.  She turns her attention to an "evil-smelling onion shoot."  "Some can't be that simple," she said.  "I know I never could."